Mountain Tall
by Bainaku
Summary: Toph makes a journey.  Set post-series.


**Commentary: **My first foray into ATLA fanfiction—surely not my last. I hope you enjoy it. =) Set post-series.

**Disclaimer: **Don't own the franchise.

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"_It takes but a little thing to bring down a mountain."_

—Chinese proverb

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**MOUNTAIN TALL**

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The messengers found her in the sixth month.

Toph felt their footsteps hours before they reached her canyon's small summit. She knew too the fevered beats of their hearts long prior to their appearance in her presence, the shuddering of their lungs in their heaving chests. The air was thin and they sucked at it desperately, and in the end she felt badly for them—they had come a long way, these water-people, just to see her. In her mercy she slid on channels of slate to meet them, and the sun stood two handspans above the horizon. Not that she knew.

Pebbles from her arrival fell on upturned faces and bristling topknots, and the scent that seeped from their pores carried with it the faint reek of blubber-jerky.

They gave her the news and she responded in her normal way: with a blank stare.

"Huh," she said aloud at last. She slid a blackened thumbnail between her teeth, whittled it around a little. Removed it. Spat. She finished, "Well, that's how those things work, you know." Her voice was the epitome of nonchalance—the quintessence of apathy her face. A single bead of sweat ran around the corner of a stone green-gray eye.

Such is the manner of a mountain: a trickle on its surface belies the raging river in its belly.

Toph's stomach roiled. She felt like she was going to throw up.

"Will you go?" asked the heavier of the messenger pair. He favored his right foot slightly and balanced on its edge. A childhood injury, she imagined. Probably stung like a bitch in the cold.

Toph's mouth, so dry, opened. She licked her lips and flexed her toes against the hard earth. She sensed the daily closing endeavors of the tunnel project, sure to stall without her—she heard already the _snick _of flint kindling the evening's cookfires. She knew there were people who would sit at them, laughing, and want her company.

But she also remembered _their _laughter, ripples of the past like an ocean strong enough to reach her even here in this high place. Her student's breathless cackle, high as the clouds; his companion's soft chuckle, a brook's song; her brother's strangled, gasping snort; the complacent quiet, even, of the group's last member.

It was the chuckle she recalled best, though, because she had heard and coveted it the most: the special sound of her first friend.

Her stomach lurched again and her heart did too, and she said, "Yeah. I'll go."

She set off immediately, in fact, and left the messengers to the cookfires, following the trail they had made in their quest to find her. She walked into the night and its moonless darkness swallowed her.

A month's brisk walk found her at the rim of the desert. She beamed into the swells of heat that rose from its center, all the teeth in her skull bared in challenge. Flinging herself into the great sea of shifting sands, she called the dunes to her. She surfed them on nothing but her soles until high noon forced her into the shaded shelter of a rare oasis. This process Toph repeated again and again, day after day. Fine pale granules of the desert's lifeblood crept into her every crevice, lending to her movements a low itch; her skin browned, bronzed, finally burned under the sky's searing sun.

Time's slippery serpent slithered past. Toph left the desert finally with a shriveled belly, grit in her eyelashes, and a blaze of red shaped like the outline of her bangs spinning jagged across her brow. For a day—just one!—she rested in a fringe village, exiting its borders at sunrise. Directions from the village headman took her to the nearby foothills.

Those foothills led her heavenward into a mountain chain and north past sprawling Ba Sing Se and stacked, sturdy Omashu. Though she came near enough to both to smell each city's sure cluster, she avoided their gates—kept her pace vigorous.

The seventh month rolled into the eighth.

Toph was not by nature a nervous person. Still, as the days wore themselves away in sun-skitters and moon-notches, she found herself all but sprinting across continents. She moved mountains—literally—to lessen the length of her route. Despite her natural aversion to water, she took ferries; when her body grew so sore that she could not bend it, much less the earth beneath it, she rode trains.

The eighth month ended and Toph's bare, chapped toes touched a glacier.

She hesitated. Here her grasp of the world grew foggy, the rocks so essential to her kind of sight separated sometimes by miles of ice. She worried one foot over the glacier's surface, testing, and in her head the horizon blurred and bounced and she felt—

Screaming. Somewhere within a day's distance, her friend was screaming.

Toph ran.

She staggered into the village at sundown, feet nigh frostbitten and weeping crimson, sweat congealed to ice in her hair. Muted pictures of people staring, pointing came to her through her shredded heels; the sooty odor of blubber-jerky swept over her. All of it she ignored, limping determinedly toward her destination. She knew where to go: ever the thoughtful student, Aang had carved a path for Toph straight to the home he shared with—

"Katara!" she called, anxious. She found the doorflaps and pulled at them. They tangled: she ripped one free, threw it aside, strode into the hut. Nostrils assaulted by the coppery tang of blood freshly spilled, she cried again, "Katara!"

Hands on her shoulders—arms around her, tight. "You made it!" Aang exulted. "We're so glad to see y—"

"Katara!" Toph insisted, struggling in her student's exuberant grip. "Where's—"

"Here," came the whisper, and Toph chased it. She crept to the bedside and crouched there, reaching out, patting her fingers carefully, shamelessly over her friend's face—where a smile bloomed, of course.

"Sweetness," breathed Toph. Relief made the moniker wobble. "You're okay."

But Katara felt _different _now to the Earthbender's wandering fingers, and Aang too—she sunken, he swollen, both suffused in a proud joy that sent muffled tremors through the hut's earthen floor. Only Sokka, sniveling and sobbing in the corner, was the same as she remembered him.

Under Toph's thumb Katara's smile grew. "Here," she said again, "your arms, Toph. Hold them out a bit."

Toph obeyed and drew near the small thing Katara gave to her. She ghosted her fingertips over its frailty—smelled its newness. Its pulse throbbed softly between her heart's own drumbeats and she felt her two friends together in it, calling to her, welcoming her home.

Katara whispered, "His name is Tenzin, Auntie Toph."

As though in agreement, it—no, _he_—voiced a reedy howl and thrashed closer to her granite warmth.

The river in the mountain burst forth. Like the baby in her arms, Toph cried.

Just a little.


End file.
